As "wealth management" becomes more inclusive and pitched to a mass market, industry leaders debate whether the term has outlived its usefullness, and should be changed.

Has “wealth management” outlived its usefulness?

Not the service. What the service is called.

Five years ago, wealth management essentially meant extremely sophisticated financial planning and asset management for clients who had at least $1 million in investible assets, if not much, much more.

Now it is a ubiquitous term, not exclusive, and simply means a combination of financial planning and investment management – for, well - anybody.

Take the case of Citibank’s “Personal Wealth Management” division.

In April, Deborah McWhinney, a respected industry veteran and a former top executive at Charles Schwab, was named head of the division, which includes Citibank’s existing US network of branch-based financial advisors.

After Ms McWhinney explained what the advisors would be doing as part of their “wealth management service,” it was obvious that a teenager who wanted to open an account at Citi with his or her savings from a summer camp job would be considered a wealth management customer.

In June, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney launched a massive marketing campaign to promote the introduction of the rebranded firm which was described as “a new wealth management firm with over 130 years of experience.” Never mind that the term didn’t exist 30 years ago, much less 130.

But the millions of dollars that new majority owners Morgan Stanley spent on emphasizing the “wealth management” part of its brokerage business in full page newspaper ads and TV commercials merely underscored how critical financial service marketing executives have convinced themselves the phrase has become.

It’s a sentiment that is evident on the local level as well.

In August, FP Financial Services, a 31-year old financial planning firm based in the Chicago suburb of Palatine, Ill., with assets of $130 million, changed its name to Guidant Wealth Advisers.

And in September, The Hartford Financial Services became the latest insurance company to make a major play for what it’s calling the wealth management business.

But clearly, what Guidant and The Hartford are doing is very different from what Northern Trust and Rockefeller & Co. are offering their clients.

Indeed, their clients are very different from Northern’s and Rockefeller’s.

Nonetheless, Doug Regan, Northern Trust’s head of wealth management, points out that if someone has $20,000 to invest, as opposed to $20 million, that is still real wealth – for that person.

Therefore, Mr. Regan said he does not have any problem with the term “wealth management.”

While he doesn’t think the phrase is going away anytime soon, he does believe it will – or should – become more narrowly defined.

“I think it will become more stratified, and taken to a higher level,” Mr Regan said. “It will define more tightly what institutions can do for clients in providing services such as art advisory, tax advisory and lifestyle management.”

Others, however, believe what is now being called “wealth management” will eventually be called something else.

“The term has become so bastardized that everyone considers themselves a wealth manager,” said Gary Carrai, senior managing director for Fortigent LLC, a leading industry platform provider and research firm. “And when too many people are doing something and we can’t differentiate one from the other, it’s time for a new term.”

Sure enough, a survey by the Spectrem Group of Chicago late last year found that only one-third of individuals with more than $500,000 in investible assets found the term “wealth management” appealing, and 41 per cent responded negatively to it.

Using the term "wealth management" imprecisely and too frequently has not only led to its commoditization, it also “dilutes the value of true wealth management," according to Tom Wynn, a Spectrem Group director who conducted research for the study, "The Affluent and their Perception of Wealth Management.”

"What is passed off as wealth management is often just good old financial planning," said Dave Swanson, principal of SwanDog Strategic Marketing LLC, a Warrenville, Ill.-based firm that works with financial services companies. “It's doing a disservice to the higher-end customers. It's as if Wal-Mart suddenly decided it wanted to be in the wealth management business."

Financial advisors who work with wealthy clients have noticed, and are not happy.

“The term has been hijacked by large institutions trying to project an image of being a boutique,” said William Rankin, chief executive of Shelterwood Family Services LLC of New York.

Financial institutions don’t get much larger than Bank of America, and Sallie  Krawcheck, the new president of the bank’s global wealth and investment management unit, gets it right when she says  wealth management is “in the eye of the beholder. To some people it means level of wealth, to others it means a business model.”

BoA, she said, sees wealth management “quite broadly.”

Which is precisely why financial advisors and firms who actually are targeting truly wealthy clients may leave “wealth management” to the mass market and find a new catch phrase of their own.

“It’s an interesting conundrum,” said Ken Krimstein, creative director for Laughlin Constable, a New York-based advertising agency. “Typically, true wealth shows itself very discreetly and is not flashy.  If you have to package it and sell it, you have to ‘throw a net around it,’ in other words, define and describe it for a specific audience.”

For example, what’s called wealth management today might be called “strategic resource consulting” tomorrow, Mr Krimstein said.

And a wealth manager may well become an “affluent advancement advocate.”

Better yet, Mr Krimstein suggested, what wealthy, yacht-owning client, wouldn’t want to tell his friends, presumably while sipping expensive champagne, that he or she doesn’t have a mere financial advisor or wealth manager, but “My Very Own Goldman.”

Don Draper, lead character of the hit TV show about advertising, Mad Men, couldn’t have put it better.